Only getting 6mb/s DL on M50 Fibre contract

[Tharoz]

I've been with Virgin Media for my broadband for about one year now, I have the M50 fibre package and my contract began with a new installation to my address which I was told had never been on Virgin Broadband before. The street box is directly outside my property, less than five metres from my hub, which is in turn connected to my computer through a wired connection on a 5 metre cable.

Throughout this period I have never had anything other than about 6mb/s download speed. I've also tried a wireless connection, unsurprisingly it was no better, but I mention it for completeness.

What I am looking for is suggestions and solutions to resolve this as a last shot before I cancel the contract and go with anyone else.

I have contacted Virgin Media support about this issue on numerous occasions, the most recent of which was earlier today. On every single occasion, they have latched onto the first explanation they come up with that means the issue is not their fault, and yet they have regularly come up with different excuses, ranging from my DNS server being at fault, to the digital distribution platform Steam's servers being too slow... to the BBC news servers being slow. You get the picture I hope. It does not help that I have never got through to anyone at Virgin who knows anything beyond the checksheet in front of them.

My personal; theory is an error in the initial installation, or settings in the street box, because speedtests always come back in the range of 40-50mb/s which suggests to me that the issue must be pretty close to my address. However noone at Virgin will consider that an error on their part at any stage could be remotely possible.

If anyone can offer potential solutions, or a way to make Virgin take this seriously and investigate properly, I would be extremely grateful.

[jb66]

If your getting 50mb on speedtrst.net it's not a physical fault and has nothing to do with your cables or street box

[cje85]

You may be getting megabits and megabytes mixed up, as 50 Megabits is 6.25 Megabytes

Speediest will show your speed in megabits (50) but a file download will show megabytes (6).

[Zach_R]

Hi @Tharoz,

Thank you for your post and welcome to our community forums. We're here to help.

I am very sorry to hear that you're having some problems with your connection recently and that you're struggling to get to the bottom of what's going on. In the first instance, would you mind checking our Service Status page to see if there are any known area impacting faults?

If there aren't, can you clarify what troubleshooting you've carried out thus far? Can you also confirm if your wired connection is also impacted, or just wireless/Wi-Fi?

Thanks,
​​​​​​​

[Tharoz]

Hello,

My service status lists no known area faults.

Both my wired and wireless services are impacted. But I am most concerned about my wired connection as this is the device I use most.

I have previously spoken to customer service on the phone, and they have run me through their checklist. Resetting router, moving router around and raising it up to get a better signal. Running a speedtest, which normally comes back with a good speed. After this they tend to run out of steam.

If you can assist I would be grateful.

If the answer is as suggested above, that I'm misreading the speed, then my question would become, why am I paying so much for such a slow connection?

Thanks.

[jem101]

It does sound as if there isn't actually anything wrong with your connection and you are just misunderstanding the test results. If you are on VM's 50 meg service this is 50 MegaBITS per second (usually written as 50Mb/s (small b for bits)) - measurements of data transfer speeds are always measured in bits per second and if when you run the standard speed tests, that's the figures you see then all's well, not surprising the the customer service people couldn't go any further.

Now file sizes are expressed in BYTES and Megabytes usually written as MB (big B for bytes), now somewhat annoyingly when you download a file and look at the progress bars, they often express the download speed as MegaBYTES per second or MB/s.

As stated above a data transfer rate of 50 Mb/s translates to (roughly) 6.25 MB/s which would be about right.

As to how much you are paying for this, relatively slow, connection is between you and VM and you would need to contact them to see what other offers and deals you could get.